14 February 2016
Updated: 4 March 2016
(See also, Why I am against Cell Phones and Apple vs. FBI)
The iPhone is a device that was created by Apple Computing in 2004. The iPhone was, and continues to be, the primary DumbPhone selling on the consumer market.
Ever since the creation of the iPhone (or, as the opposition of them calls them, iThings) the iThing has created a Jail for the user and a mass-surveillance tool. The issues go beyond the fact it uses non-free software.
The new-er iThings have the ability to read your fingerprint. The fingerprint reader technology is not publisized and it most likely submits the data to Apple. For this reason, I often avoid touching iThings at all, though Apple claims that it can only read the fingerprint on what they call the "Home" button.
Siri is the AI assistant bundled with iOS version 4 and above. It is based off the research of the Apple Knowledge Navigator project in the 1990's. However, this AI is very counter productive, and has a large number of problems within it of itself. Here is a summary of the issues I have with it:
Siri is always on, listening for the phrase "Hello Siri". This has the option to disable, but it is hidden within many settings and the average user doesn't even know of the setting's existence. For this reason, I choose my words carefully when speaking near an iThing.
Though they have removed it as soon as it was publicized, Siri was censoring the locations of abortion clinics, as reported by The Guardian (back-up link) in 2011, and related information when asked to locate them. This means that Apple designed it to be forcing the political views of its creators. This is not the only form of censorship. See this web page for more instances of censorship by Apple.
That long-lived rumor of Apple designing their products to break, and be obsolete in less than a year, is true. They purposefully rush the latest DumbPhone to the market with heavy advertising, then two months later release a completely different product than what was advertised, only to do the same thing 4 months later. This is for money, getting it out of perceived consumer stupidity. It sadly works. This is called Perceived-Obsolescence. You can read more about this at the Defective by Design webpage.
Just like how Windon't 10 constantly screenshots your data and sends it to a Microsoft server, the same technology could be implemented into the iThing. In fact, due to it being unexpected, the iThing being non-free, and the fact that logging incoming/outgoing communications on a DumbPhone is hard, it could already be implemented now.
Apple doesn't even need to screenshot your device. It would be much easier (and much more efficient) to simply upload the plain-text data from your various "apps" and store them on Apple Servers.
Already, most users are "voluntarily" submitting data to Apple Servers through the use of iCloud. Again, the feature to disable auto-upload to iCloud is hidden. In 2013, this malicious setting was exploited by "The Hacker known as 4chan" to spread nude photographs of celebrities who used the iThings.
Due to the control that Apple exerts over the independent software developers for its products, it is safe to assume that Apple is also injecting code into the "app"s. This code can not be seen due to the fact that the software is stored in binary form on the "app" store. Having the published source-code by the software developer is meaningless, because if such an attack were to take place, it would be a trusting in trust type attack, and it could easily be corrupted into the binary. You can not cross-check the binary to the source either. This is because the main system is locked, and you can not move the binary to another machine, nor access it within the DumbPhone. Therefore, you can not confirm nor deny this assumption, but it is very likely with everything else Apple is known to do. Yet another way DRM screws the user.
It is well known that Apple already sells all user data, as reported by Consumerist (back-up link) in 2010. This reporting was a simple repeating of Apple's own ToS that many people sadly overlook. As an intelligent consumer, I do not overlook it and I read it. I also only use Freely licensed software, which Apple does not comply to, and usually does not have a ToS.
This is a reason you can choose to ignore. The culture of the average iPhone user is very yuck. Typically, the average iPhone user is the kind of guy who also sits in Starbucks, wears a stupid hipster getup, and types away at his keyboard in front of everyone. When he finally gets home, he reads Adbusters Magazine and thinks himself a true Anarcho-Punk (or Communist, whichever is more in vogue at the moment) and then uses Twitter and Facebook. The culture that the iPhone attracts is really just gross. I don't want to be a part of that and you shouldn't want to be either. Owning an iPhone doesn't necessarily make you a normie, but do you want to associate with these normies: Self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalists that use a disturbingly grotesque piece of hardware that they only bought because it was through peer-pressure, advertising, and consumerism?